Mobile phones as educational technologies; Vivien visiting our lab

Vivien visited us in the lab and tried out a number of ideas for the project "mobile phones as a learning platform". She really enjoyed to test and comment new applications and devices and she felt for one day like a real researcher and at the same time really contribute insights from a end-user perspective - it is never too early to spark the fascination of research ;-)

Elba is currently putting together applications for a field study later this year. We plan to study of the use of mobile phones for teaching and revision in Panama with a large deployment supported by Nokia Research Center.

We think that mobile phones - especially as they are widely deployed around the world - offer a good alternative to laptop computers [1]. Our expectations are that the mobile phones provide similar benefits as a laptop in education without the drawbacks seen at the OLPC project. Especially the multimedia capabilities of phones and use while on the way are very tempting.

[1] Valderrama Bahamóndez, E. d. and Schmidt, A. 2010. A survey to assess the potential of mobile phones as a learning platform for panama. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI EA '10. ACM, New York, NY, 3667-3672. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754036

PS: if you are in Essen you have to see the Zeche Zollverein (a world cultural heritage; the most beautiful coal mine in the world)